Archived: The Educational System in the United States: Case Study Findings

Strategies for Dealing with Individual
Differences
The range of individual differences in ability among students within a single class-
room is a daily pedagogical challenge for teachers, and the math and science
teachers we visited were no exception. At the school level, administrators are
faced with the task of providing programs that address students with a variety of
needs while maintaining equity and equality of access to all. However, placement
in tracks is influenced not only by students’ characteristics, but by school charac-
teristics as well. Each school’s practices of scheduling and grouping are affected
by such local constraints as the availability of human and material resources for
instruction, the demographic makeup of the surrounding communities, and the
educational philosophies of administrators and teachers (Braddock 1990).
Teachers at schools where students were performing at average levels for the state
reported a wide range of students in terms of ability and interest. A teacher at
such a school described the classes she teaches in a way that captures the essence
of challenge almost all teachers reported facing:
My first and second period runs the gamut, from A-plus, excellent students to
people who come maybe once a week. That is a range! This class—an honors
class—there’s a range of ability all right, but it’s not nearly that great. There
are some students in here who are in there because their parents or their
deans call them honors students, and if you are an honors student, you take
mostly honors courses. So there are a couple of people in here who would
probably be better off in regular class, but for some reason or another they
are in the honors class. There are some students in here that are very bright,
but are lazy. But they’re honors students, too. There are some students in here
who aren’t as bright, but they work very hard, so it may not be intuitive for
them, but with effort they match the achievement of the ones who are
brighter. Then, there’s the people who are both bright and hard working, and
they do great. (Physics teacher, Springdale High School)
To deal with this range of abilities, this teacher said that she tried to teach to
the middle level of abilities in each classroom to the extent possible. In fact, the
majority of teachers we talked with reported using such a strategy. This teacher
shared the concern of other teachers that by teaching to the middle, the brighter
students in her classes would become bored and the slower students would not
be able to keep up with the material. She saw no perfect solution to this dilemma,
but she viewed tracking and ability grouping as reasonable strategies to minimize
the range of difference within a classroom. By tracking students, she felt that it
would be easier to teach to the middle, since tracked classrooms have smaller
ranges. Nevertheless, she said she believed that even tracking is limited in useful-

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ness, since there will be variation within any classroom of large numbers of stu-
dents.
A teacher at Vanderbilt articulated the strategies that most teachers we inter-
viewed and observed employed when there were students with a range of ability
in the classrooms, a situation that math teachers said was typical:
Well, I think it is far more complicated for math, where you either know it
or you don’t. In English, you can always write something, even if you skipped
something before. You can’t do that in math. It’s hard in math, because there
are kids who struggle in classes where other kids catch on real fast. Even
though we have different levels of classes, we have these problems. Like in
the general algebra class, you have kids who just missed the cut-off for ad-
vanced algebra class and kids who aren’t even close. It’s a struggle. The way
I deal with it is that the kids who are doing poorly come in for extra help
or sign up for the math assistance class. And for those who do well, you give
them cool problems before class or after class to make them think. Within the
class, I know that there are kids who are bored silly and those that are drown-
ing. And I encourage kids to ask questions. I also encourage kids to express
their solutions. Some kids may do it differently and be four steps ahead of
everyone else. I would have him explain it to everyone. Then, I would ask
another kid to give his solution. Then, I would tell the solution that would
always work. That way, the kids learn something.